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Tales of the Sagacious Secretary

"Let him appear...just let him APPEAR...we'll see if he has the guts....I shall APPEAL........!!"

......hollered the bespectacled, crumpled old lady waving a spatula from her tiny tea-shack out to a rather petrified urchin who turned around and scampered away the immediate second her verbal tirade ceased.

The grand Old Post Office Street in Kolkata, the epientre of all legal activity in the city running along the banks of the Ganges, on which stands gaunt and proud the Kolkata High Court, sturdy and handsome with its typical pre-independence, 'Anglo' architecture and air, is quite literally a tiny universe in itself. On any given time of any day, apart from declared holidays of course, Old P.O. Street disappears under an enormous galaxy of human beings, hundreds of cars parked bumper to bumper in numerous parallel lines that zig-zag beyond visual limits, numerous little stalls and shacks offering typewriting services, notary sevices and a few, even legal advice, lots and lots of tiny stalls selling cigarettes, tea, juice and eatables and also a few restaurants and pharmacies. Apart from the High Court, Old PO Street has a number of old buildings originating from the pre-independence era which house some of India's top most law offices........yet something quite pleasently different, often unnoticed yet extremely significant about life in this lane aroused my deep interest and desire to explore.
During one of my internships with an extremely reputed law firm situated in one such building, on the opposite of 'Temple Towers' I couldn't help being intrigued and amused by a prominent existence of a healthy amount of humour, intentional, unintentional or sarcastic, that garnished everyday conversations between people working for a living in and around the High Court and it's adjacent law offices. Walking down Old P.O.Street, one shall experience a more-than-generous use of heavy legal parlance by everyday people there, used freely to assert or make clear a point and it did'nt really matter if it pertained to a legal business or not. The following narration accounts for a month's worth of 'overhearings'.

Ask if you can smoke inside a restaurant and you'll be told to 'plead' with the owner.
On various instances you'll hear about people 'appear-ing before' and even 'disappear-ing from' places....no stupid you dont need a magic wand!!
And of course, you can have your way with everyone if you just 'appeal' but if you 'argue' too much you're in for a 'penalty'.
It is Law firms on this grand old lane though that hold the real deal when it comes to wisecracks and hilariously sarcastic one-liners, quite interestingly the richest source of these are the non-legal staff i.e. stenographers, tea-boys, sundry errand-boys and finally, the secretaries. Being the 'downtrodden' or the 'trodden-upon', their expressions are often chillingly satirical.
Placed in a stuffy cubicle outside the boss's cabins I had the priviledge of mingling with the ground-level staff and thereby gathering an insight on their own little world. In every law office the immediate secretary to the boss enjoys a certain exalted status among the non-legal staff and is generally attributed with a certain degree of stoical sagacity, his sidekicks and generals being the stenographers, tea-boys, munimji's and other foot soldiers further lower in the hierarchy, a secretary is often regarded as the holder of inside information. He is, on one hand the spokesperson of the boss himself and on the other, the collective voice of the non-legal staff as well; quite a tight spot one would presume, but our man is a smooth operator. Being quite the 'narad-muni', neither the bosses nor clients, not even interns are spared of their scrutiny,examination, an inevitable subsequent criticism or the dreaded 'gyaan' session. Even judgements, petitions, legal documents and arguments are often critically evaluated and deliberated upon.

He is almost a superhero, that stupendous wisdom armed with a razor's edge wit and an equally sharp tongue, which he unremmitingly swishes and slashes every so often, accompanied by dollops of a "been there, done that so you're just a sissy.." attitude that coloured words spoken in completely smashed english (punctuated with shocking Bengali expletives), coupled with a hearty revolutionary spirit, a thorough knowledge of global politics and of course, by-the-minute answers to every pressing problem faced by the nation(phew!!) maketh the man that a sagacious secretary is; something between a born leader and a clown.

The state-of-affairs became quite transparent to me the day my boss's sagacious secretary muttered heavily under his breath, "bhodrolok Kudi patar petition dersho patai lekhechen...eeeeeeesh!!"("the gentleman has written a 20-page petition in 150 pages....geeeeeeeez!!"), under his breath while struggling with stacking fleshy bundles of paper together. My awe and respect for this gentleman shot through the roof one fine morning when I overheard him saying, "akhono matha ghamai-ni ami sir....chinta nei...rasta ami bar korboi...!!"( I haven't laboured my mind yet,my dear sir.......... I shall DEFINITELY find a way out of this....!") over the phone. Another day, another sage screamed out from his cubicle to another steno after having made sure his boss was out of earshot, " shotero baar interim order extend koralam.......aar ekbar bhabchi koriei di, ki bolo??"( "I had the interim order extended 17 times.....I might as well get it done once again...whatsay??"), just before my nervous system could react to that one, another blow.. "Judgesaheb case nite parchen-na.....ki je kori?.....shob adjourn kore deova uchit!! "( "The respected Judge-saheb is unable to deal with the cases....what do I do?.....he should adjourn all his cases!!") struck me. Confused and slightly frustrated that these babus and clerks knew more than myself, a final-year law student pursuing a rather expensive course at a well respected law college, trying to find my way around the legal world, I dawdled over to my cubicle. The possible sense and concealed passion in the saying, "Baangalke High Court dekhiyo na"("never bring up the High Court while dealing with a 'Bengali'") lay unfurled before me the very next day when I overheard the secretary of a senior lawyer boast to someone else, "ki chai?? Stay?? nishchoi paiyye debo!!!!( what do you want?? a Stay order?? I'll definitely have it done...!").

The air inside the building that housed my office set in a rather formal, somewhat stiff English feel. The intricate wood-work and architecture, the old elevator, those high walls, the smell of smoked tobacco and of course the inevitable and pleasent scent of old books espoucing the air give the place a historical appearance reflecting a high degree of British grandeur. But no old building in Kolkata is complete without the omnipresent legacy of the 'babu', his romance with the colour red, something which he so lovingly stains the walls of his city with, the colour that had promised so much yet gave so less . I meant, those paan-spittle stains gracing the walls, reached so high up I found it extremely difficult picturing how one might've been able to spew the contents of his mouth that high up on the wall!!
Pondering on the physics involved with projecting spittle so high up in the air, one fine morning as I clambered up the dark stairways leading to the floor where my office was situated, I noticed a young member of the non-legal staff doing something rather bold. Its a well known rule that nobody was to leave his/her cubicle during office hours except during lunch-break or on official duty and my firm was pretty strict about this particular regulation of theirs for obvious reasons. One brave Sir Galahad stood outside the office doors casually leaning his back against the window panes, holding a cell phone to his ear his highness jabbered away with someone loudly, blowing large smoke rings from his mouth during intervals. I stood there admiring his nonchalance and defiant pose. The boss was surely not in today.
My rather obvious assumption was confirmed in seconds as I made my way through the doors and into the little hall that housed various little officerooms; all the secretary babus, stenographers and even the tea-boys huddled around one particular table. Tea was ordered all around. The boss was at a conference and therefore the mice were at play. I joined in with the crowd. The sagacious secretary began, "Dhoro ekta gaadi 60-r speed-e jete jete break fail korlo......tokhon ki kore gaadi thamabe?"( Suppose a car is travelling at a speed of 60 when it's breaks fail, what would you do to stop it?").
A deliberation then commenced with mind-riddling permutations, combinations and fervid arguments on whether the gear-handle would break if moved to first-gear while the car was running or for that matter what would happen if the car were brought to reverse while it was still running, the conversation then raced further on through the faithfulness of the dear old Ambassador particularly to the Bengali community, the rash driving on Red Road, the Chief Minister's latest speech then quickly deviating to the Mohun Bagan line-up and fish prices for a short while after which, I kid you not, we were back to accidents again!!....the door slung open all of a sudden and in marched my boss, his appearance effecting various disappearances everywhere, the babus swiftly sprung back to their 'I-am-so-God-damn-busy-working' positions, pens began moving, the tetris and pac-mans disappeared from computer screens and keyboards began clattering. Bless his heart, my boss picked up a legal brief and walked out again. Without warning, his Secretary immediately turned to me and began, "Maarkaari-r sathe aar kono dhatu meshe kina?"("Does any other metal react with Mercury?"), taken aback I stuttered to explain the inadequacy of my knowledge of Chemistry before finishing which he remarked, "MESHE NA.....ALBAAT MESHE NA......dutoi dhongsho hoye jay!!" ("THEY DO NOT REACT.....both of them get DESTROYED!!") concluded the venerable sagacious secretary.

As the last day of my internship crawled lazily towards a conclusion, I slammed shut the book on Intellectual Property Law that I had just finished 'sleeping' over, wide eyed with utter disbelief that there actually existed a Mark based on a character of one of Ian Fleming's novels...........called 'PUSSY GALORE!!' and that someone had actually applied to have it registered for selling his goods by that name.
I strolled down Old P.O.Street looking for my driver amidst the thinning crowd, the bloke was nowhere to be seen. The sun turned a mellow shade of orange having already disappeared half way over the tree tops and a gentle breeze blew over the place now carrying a smell that foretold that rainfall was approaching soon, groups of people now stood surrounding little snack/tea stalls catching up on the days events and gossip, some hurried away sensing a shower in the offing. Within moments it grew dark and a light drizzle descended over Old P.O.Street pacing up life immediately, lawyers fled for cover holding files or briefs over their heads, people scampered around rushing inside shops, inside any place that offered a temporary shelter, some simply walked on not bothered. Deciding not to budge till my driver showed up I took refuge underneath a large parapet belonging to a book store.
Next to me stood two people immersed in a deeply intense conversation. They hadn't noticed my presence. A fiery debate ensued and a tiny crowd had gathered around them cramming themselves in whatever little space was left under the parapet, gaping intently at the two gentlemen. All of a sudden, causing an echoe across the much deserted Old P.O.Street and a highly unwelcome shiver down my spine, the sagacious secretary standing right next to me exclaimed, " But dear Mr. Mittir(Mitra), 'the EVIDENCE of the pudding is in it's eating!!'"
The drizzle had subsided considerably and my driver emerged from inside a tea-shack around the corner of the street scratching his pot-belly holding a paper bag stuffed with spiced puffed rice, grinning like a village idiot. Smiling, I quietly noted down my last observation underneath the parapet and headed off towards my car. Driving past a photocopy shop called 'EVIDENCE' I turned around to take a last look at the grand old High Court of Kolkata, my flight to Pune left early next day.

TAGGED
http://etceteraetalandblah.blogspot.com/ (Cheshire Cat) tagged me....

1. Pick out a scar you have, and explain how you got it:
there’s a small one in my heart....
2. What is on the walls in your room?
Phillip.H.Anselmo looking down and pointing a finger at me…and a black lizard rt behind him.
3. What does your phone look like?
Old, tired and dimming...
4. What music do you listen to?
I go through musical phases…the current ones of heavy metal so metal it is. Otherwise I enjoy classic rock, funk, soul, blues, ‘world music’ and a select bit of jazz.
5. What is your current desktop picture?
MOTORHEAD!!!!!
6. What do you want more than anything right now?
A chilled Vodka n Tonic water.
7. Do you believe in gay marriage?
Of course, I’ll invite you all to mine…
8. What time were you born?
3rd November 1984. heard it was 11.20 pm, weighed a healthy 3 kilos...Indira Gandhi died that day.
9.Are your parents still together?
Yeah, so far.
10. What are you listening to?
’Desperado’ by Eagles, my Metal modes switched off for the time being!
11. The last person to make you cry?
Tom Hanks, finished watching FORREST GUMP a lil while back…
13. What is your favourite perfume/cologne?
Brute, and Davidoff Cool Waters for men.
14. What kind of hair/eye colour do you like on the opposite sex?
Hair: Should be long, curly/straight and flowy
Eyes: Large n deep.
15. Do you like pain killers?
I like ‘em with Coke or I take ‘em neat.
16. Are you too shy to ask someone out?
No, I did ask someone out once....but that was long back.
17. Fave pizza topping?
Shredded meat of all kinds and lots of cheese, chillies n anchovies; there was a pizza by this description, can’t recollect the name right now.
18. If you could eat anything right now, what would it be?
A large bowl of cold yogurt with sliced pieces of alphonso mangos, lichis and grapes in it and a tall glass of chilled orangeade with a drop of honey to go down with it.
19. Who was the last person you made mad?
I seem to have driven everybody I know mad at some point in my life….my Math teachers still under specialised treatment and my drum teachers dead.
20. Is anyone in love with you?
No.

I tag http://daunplugged.blogspot.com/ (Bix) and http://www.faithlessfreak.blogspot.com/ ( Devilshit)

What is it I am so crazily in love with?
Is it my mental image of the individual seated behind those drums?
Is it the music that emanates from the instrument?
Is it the playing, the drummer's moves?
Is it the raw power that the instrument radiates?
Is it the adrenalin rush, the sweat?
Or, is it the visual grandeur of the instrument?
Is it all one big dream, a phase?....will it all be gone one day...my love...my passion?

The Melodies of Madagascar ....

As I seated myself rather uncomfortably in one of the forward rows facing the stage inside the lounge cum auditorium of Princeton Club, Kolkata I observed that although the evening’s event had been advertised in The Telegraph and was therefore presumably open for anyone, the crowd inside, which mainly comprised of Indian and French members of the French Consulate, were tight and pretty cold to unknown faces. But then again, I’d traveled all this distance, literally argued with staff members of the club who wouldn’t allow non-members in on a Monday evening and battled my apprehension of unknown faces and places just to watch the concert, I wasn’t gonna give in easy. Later on it was discovered they weren’t ‘informed’ that the show was free, their saccharine sweetness surfacing after the little discovery, one security guard quite gracefully lead me into the auditorium himself.
Not many of us would be familiar with the existence of the fourth largest island in the world, located in the Indian Ocean called Madagascar, leave alone its culture and musical heritage. Neither was I, but last evening’s show featuring Regis Gizavo, a brilliant, Accordionist, composer and singer and David Mirandon, a long time associate of Gizavo, a brilliant drummer/ percussionist, was a mellifluous introduction to the island nation and it’s music. Gizavo sang his own compositions in Malagasy language playing the Accordion, an instrument I’d usually seen on television and once played live by street musicians in Hanover, Germany.
The Accordion has an almost incredible ability to soothe and put the listener in a trance and at the same time tempt one to break into a dance. Gizavo, who earlier in the evening reprimanded a noisy crowd in the background for their disrespect and lack of courtesy(mostly guzzling old expatriates from France) showed an absolute mastery over the instrument, deftly using the fingers on his left hand to manage the base patterns and those on his right hand to play the notes of the song. David Mirandon, on the other hand appeared to be the subtlest percussionist ever, placing two congas on either side of his base drum, behind the toms, Mirandon mostly used brushes, hot-rods, felt beaters and very often his bare hands to provide rhythmic assistance to Gizavo and what a perfectly amazing job he did! Every time the duo reached a musical crescendo it would arouse loud hoots and cheers from the crowd, which had considerably thickened by the time the duo were through with their third or fourth composition.
As I was strolled towards the club gates I was reminded of a recent A.R Rahman concert somewhere in the Middle East that I was closely following on TV the other day, an enormous crowd of some 20-30 thousand, what glitz, what glamour, women romping around everywhere, almost a tiny city of musicians on stage, every single famous singer appearing on stage and goofing up songs one after the other, the glitterati, special guests, confetti and what not….but where was the music? What happened to the music?
Bloody over-commercialization!! I couldn’t help wondering how fame and making it to the ‘big-league’ murders the musicianship in an artist, why Shivamani being such an able percussionist, having set up his entire cornucopia, his gamut of drums on stage shook shakers and tambourines throughout the AR Rahman concert making a complete idiot of himself, why do people have to rely on big shows to sell music, why do they have to lip sync, why do people judge music by the videos they show on MTV, why ?
As I exited Princeton, I sent up a little prayer to The Lord asking him to keep the two dazzling musicians I’d just heard from getting devoured by this unfortunate consequentiality called 'fame'.

DISCLAIMER(for oversensitive readers); I did not intend to insult any musician in the above essay(even if I sounded like I did....du-uh!!) and all opinions expressed above are based on my observations so shut up n read....

Thou Shall NOT be gluttonous!!

I was made to realize the punitive muscle of the 7 deadly sins by a tiny occurrence last week. Being bored out of my wits of microwaving little red ants to kill time, I went out shopping with mom that morning. We shopped all morning without having so much as a morsel to eat, and hunger brings the desperate beast out in me…….a damn stupid one too. Sometime in the evening as our car passed by a ‘vada pav’ vendor here in New Alipore, my tongue watered like a cube of melting ice. I asked the car to be stopped and stepped out, mom suggested I hold it a little longer as we were getting closer to home and dinner would be ready in a matter of minutes, but no, I had to satiate the voracious monster of a stomach raving and ranting inside me. Not heeding her proposition I sprinted across to the vendor and ordered a vada pav. The prospect of eating a vada pav in Kolkata strengthened my reason to buy the snack only from that vendor in spite of there being several other stalls and shops around selling other things.
The ‘vada’s were ridiculously tiny and the vendor charged 12 rupees per vada pav, a good reason to walk away but I haggled with the man as to why such was the case, his reason seemed fair, “sahabji, people here don’t eat vada pavs so they don’t know what this is…therefore I can have my way”!
Disclosing to him that I’ve been living in the land of vadas and pavs for the last four years literally surviving on them during exams and financial famines didn’t help much as he shut me up instantly by telling me that he too was from Pune and wait for this……he had his house and shop next to the sea-coast there! A sea-coast in Pune?
Nevertheless I diverted my attention to a few passing ladies when he wrapped the little thing in paper and handed it to me, by then my painful starvation had reached its pinnacle and as I frantically began unwrapping what he took an immaculate minute and a half to wrap my sixth-sense suddenly jumped to action, like it normally does before a disaster, something told me I shouldn’t eat it. Too late! I’d paid him.
It was only a few seconds after I had placed somewhat of a kingly, rather beastly nibble into the little bundle that I wished I were dead. Tears streamed out of my eyes instantaneously, my ears went numb with a dull “weeeeeeeeee” sound and a chill shimmer shot up through my teeth to the very end of the nerves in my gums. That lump of potatoes was as searing as a little piece of glowering charcoal!! My vision went blurry as I opened my mouth and allowed a plume of smoke to escape, the “weeeeeeee” sound became louder and I realized I had singed my mouth. Whimpering, I ran across the road to mom while whatever was left of the snack lay on the pavement.
I end my span of a week-long liquid diet today, and from tomorrow it’ll be mashed boiled veggies for another week, that should afford enough time for nature to stick a fresh layer of skin in my mouth and get rid of the deep red coloration..and yeah the persisting “weeeeeee” from my ears!!
LESSONS:
# Thou shall not be Gluttonous
# Never microwave little red ants if you’re bored, Karma shall kick your ass.
# Never buy vada pavs in Kolkata…..NEVER!!!
# Steer clear of people who say they've lived near the Pune sea coast!!!!!!
# Finally, when your sixth sense pokes you in the ribs, pay heed!

My Sweet Romance with Numbers
(Chapter I: ICSE)

Before I begin with this one, lemme tell you a little something I realized way back in school, God does really weird things. I don’t know why. I don’t know why he puts people through a cornucopia of painfully eccentric situations before finally dumping them again into a totally different state of affairs so they end up totally confused in life and know chickenfeed of what’s happening! Dudes either got no sense of humor or a real twisted one. I do not know why I was made to spend YEARS shredding my soul, getting my self dignity pummeled and sending my self confidence for a long vacation to Barbados in the pursuit of trying to make the tiniest sense of that mad subject of wild numerical calculations called Mathematics, if I finally had to end up with Law! Why Lord? Why me?

“YOU FLUNKED AGAIN?!!!” screamed my infuriated father waving what seemed like another one of those damned report cards standing at the doorstep, as I entered the house dead beat and in no mood for confrontation. Lugging a goliath of a bag, hair unkempt from hours of head-scratching, hungry, partially hypnotized, insulted, nervous and utterly frustrated from yet another Math tuition; standing in a corner I presented the image of a somewhat wild, subhuman creature loathed and unloved by the world. Gauging my precarious state of mind, dad somehow hid that vibrating knob of a fist behind him, “Vani! Give him some food!” he said and sighed. Oh that sigh! Worse than a thousand beatings, a million curses and a gazillion insults was that sighing. Laced with utmost haplessness and frustration, that sigh was something that cut me from inside, it was a voice from deep inside dad, something that told me how he felt and it broke me into a thousand pieces to realize that I had failed him, again and again and again and yet again!
Mom didn’t talk much; I ate my food quietly and stumbled away into my bedroom, but there was no peace there either, my little sister sat on her side pretending to study and the moment I appeared she said something under her breath that I couldn’t make out, frankly I didn’t want to either! Thus concluded another achingly usual day of my school life.

I lay down and my head suddenly swayed dangerously and spun like a misbalanced top about to collapse and all of sudden a collage of images appeared in my head in rapid succession, numerous somber pictures from happenings of the recent and distant past and others, I feared would come true some day!! I saw one of my Math tutors demanding exactly double the amount of what he charged others as fee from dad, to include me in his class, I saw my Math teacher at school hold up my copy before the entire class clutching it with only two fingers like as if she was holding a dissected reptile from the Biology lab, I saw my class teacher look up at me with an expression so pure with abhorrence as she pointed at the ‘Math’ section in my report card which was almost perpetually marked in red, I saw myself sitting for the same Math paper for the nth time and one day…..alongside my little sister!!, I saw mom unearth that hidden stash of weekly test report-sheets carefully buried away under my tablecloth, then I saw my class X Board exam report card screaming, ‘YOU’RE DOOMED!!!’ with a familiar red underline under my Math marks and I screamed……… It was 6.30 pm in the morning, time for studies, time for Math practice!

One could get a lion to chomp grass and maybe even smoke it if one tried hard enough, bringing Democracy to Cuba would seem way easier, even Gandhi could be brought back from the past to do a solo tap-dance gig and I bet even resurrecting the dead would be child’s play for some, but making a certain Mr. Ronojoy Basu pass in his math tests posed a challenge, a real thorny challenge, a grisly battle that decimated a million teachers and other ‘concerned’ individuals, draining them of their zest and zeal for life and robbing them naked of motivation to live or teach! Tutors came and tutors went, all of their formulas, ideas and so called ‘teaching techniques’ sent flying straight out of the window by my ‘number-numbness’, I still couldn’t do multiplications in my head and failed to see that those formulas and graphs actually had a ‘meaning’ and ‘purpose’ and were not playful sketches and scribbles of a mindless toddler!! I didn’t complain much about Statistics though particularly, dumb work, make dots and join them….job done!! No matter how bizarre the squiggle looked….that’s your answer….5 marks in!!
That’s how difficult my situation, rather influence was!! After limping my way up till class X my parents realized I needed superhuman help to clear the Boards and after looking around for a month and a half they did find one……a superhuman entity!

The man was over 75 years of age, seemingly feeble and bent with burdensome age but I kid you not, he was not our regular lonely old man! He was sturdy, maybe too strong for his age, extremely alert, highly self reliant and equally fowl mouthed, but my respect for him rooted from his absolute simplicity, a trait so strangely endearing, I seemed to like him in spite of all the thrashing and hollering he hauled at me. Mr Kalipada Das’s mental faculties at the right side of 75 were still intact and gleaming, and it wasn’t only his brain that retained the sharpness of the past, so did his tongue and he happily employed it to rebuke me time and again! And his physical agility…..was something to reckon with, perhaps for the one year he taught me, pounding me black and blue was the principal workout which he disciplined himself into doing regularly! Mr. Das was an ace in Chemistry and Math and Physics was child’s play to him, the very subjects he was entrusted to teach me. His homework for two days would be a quarter of the entire Math syllabus, although he’d made it very clear from the beginning that his major ‘tool’ would be practice, I hardly realized he’d go overboard with it! As I had expected and my parents feared, after the first two months our reverend old tiger threw up his hands in the air and said, “GONE CASE”! , “YOU boy are a LEGEND….please GET OUT!!” Then followed another series of visits by dad and mom to convince him to keep teaching me and not lose hope and that I was working hard and also that I might after all manage to pull it through!

I did actually work hard practicing Math, fearfully hard, so much so that the other subjects suffered. Within months my room started filling up with stacks and piles of ‘long exercise books’ and Class X Math practice books, there was not a single book left in the market un-purchased, not a single long exercise book left to be bought from the nearby stationary, and with the long, late night shifts reserved for dedicated Math practice the situation gradually started to look real nutty….I began solving quadratic equations in my sleep, I started inadvertently assigning various characters in English literature, ‘X’s and ‘Y’s!!, I always found myself picking my teeth with divider needles and actually enjoyed it!, one morning dad discovered little algebra formulas scrawled on the bathroom walls and the oddest of them all, I'd begun jabbering with myself...complete with expressions and gesticulations.... !! So none at all, other than young Mr. Basu could correctly, rather in a tad exaggerated manner, represent what normally became of Bengali teenagers a few months before the grand, much feared ICSE exams began!! Brrrrr!
One morning I was dragged out of bed by mom, she asked me to dress quickly for we were going to meet someone very special, someone old and august, someone who could foresee the future…..a great old soothsayer! Even before I could ask what had gotten into them I found myself seated in a rather dark room smelling of incense and burnt oil, the walls were faded and had pictures of Goddess Kali hanging from them with small, slithery reptiles peeping in and out from behind the frames. An old frail man sat before me staring hard into my pupils….his eyes were piercing and watery, something told me he was the man! He was the one with the answers to my misery, my curse! He was gonna save my life…..after a few minutes of intense staring and glaring and concentrated dexterous analysis of my future, beads of sweat began appearing on his majestic forehead, the great man started rubbing his eyes vigorously, “There’s something wrong….I can’t see anything in there…please excuse me it’s time for my dinner!”, he stood up and left. I thought I saw him run!!
As the months rolled by and the fearful ICSE drew closer the fervency intensified and people began showing signs of lunacy and it was quite evident too, more than the students it was the mothers who were going bonkers! My mom was quite normal I am sure, I don’t see anything zany with the huge, ugly pearl ring I was forced to wear because it was supposed to make me “do well” in Math and I definitely never ever complained about the insane quantities of Ladiesfinger or Okra (Bhendi) and Bhrammi sag I was forced to consume every single day for lunch!! But it was all for good…..at least I hoped.
At the tuition front the homework load remained the same, Mr Das made sure my entire syllabus was done with way before crunch-time, therefore by that time I had done every single problem in my Math book, down to the tiniest illustration not once, but many, many times over. I even knew the page numbers by heart. Even after this much inhumanly practice there still lingered a funny sense of bewilderment every time I saw a sum, I somehow knew I would goof up! It just wasn’t my thing! It just didn’t feel right. And the more I practiced, the more mistakes I made, terribly dumb ones and paid for it heavily too, by surrendering myself to Mr. Royal Bengal Tiger’s ‘experimental punishments!!’, in more clearer terms, pinching my midriff till I squealed like a piglet, tugging at my sideburns till there were no sideburns left, rubbing his knuckles on my scalp till I wailed out loud and of course finally, the classical skull pulverizing slaps!! Nevertheless, the man made sure I kept practicing on and on and on…….an bawling and yelping too!!!!!!

Finally, the day came…….…and went! I waddled in and out of the exam hall like a sozzled drunkard, dragging my belongings behind me, dazed and hellishly tired. After having left a good number of problems half done and the rest to dear God’s mercy I was well convinced that what I’d committed back there on my examination paper was exemplary case of mathematical hara-kiri!!
A month and a half passed thereafter and then came that one fateful morning I shall never forget all my life, I snored away to glory very early that morning when mom literally yanked me out of bed and slapped me back to senses, “Rono, Rono!! You marks are out on the internet, come and check……..quick!”, the words still hadn’t quite registered adequately when I semi-consciously scrambled to dad’s room dragging half the bedclothes still entangled around my legs after me……carrying my heart in my hands I entered dad’s room!!!!
He sat in front of the computer glaring at the screen, I didn’t make the slightest sound, tiptoeing my way I walked up to him and THEN in what would almost seem like a scene straight out of a Bollywood masala tear-jerker, dad looked at me and smiled!! “A 62 in Mathematics, you’re in son!!”,
It hadn’t quite settled in that I’d apparently pulled off something spectacular, I sat still for a while, it definitely wasn’t a dream and dad didn’t quite look like he was joking, I tore at the computer and scanned the webpage up and down, over and over again sticking my eyeballs to the screen…. and then what followed was the Rocky IV exultation, if you know what I am talking about!!
The other high points of the day were an 87% in English and a cracking 96% in Technical Drawing, my additional subject, the second highest in my school, another daunting up-hill climb I’ll tell you folks about later.
A few months later we were informed that old Mr. Das, my Royal Bengal Tiger, my superhuman entity, my tutor was no more. Mr. Das, the real hero of this story had accomplished the un-accomplishable but died! To me and my parents he shall always be the man who saw me through a very difficult phase in my life….and helped me emerge successfully.
Well, I had no idea of what was in store for me the subsequent two years; the first major battle was fought and won with the final one still impending. But yet, what kept up the ecstasy were the expressions I’d brought out in people’s faces……..zapped!!! Dude sitting up there DOES have a point after all!

The Big Bong Theory

The above may not be the ideal nomenclature for this yet another harangue of mine but again, nothing may describe what is to follow better.
The term, Bong may literally be a shorter and cooler adaptation for the term, Bengali but for someone akin to me the word has much wider connotations. To me Bong would mean, ‘the new-age Bengali’, the culturally rich and liberal Bengali, a more considerate people who respect and believe in and subscribe to cultural-unity and oneness.
I am Bengali, in every sense of the term and whatever insight that may give you on the individual that I am. Although my mother hails from an orthodox Telugu family replete with their traditions, customs and strict rules pertaining to everything from dressing to cooking, my bringing up has had a stronger Bengali influence than the latter, and am absolutely proud of the fact that my life till now has been a collage of experiences so hilarious and interesting none of it would be possible had I been just Telugu or just Bong!
I shall now talk about a few peculiar, rather screwy characteristic traits we Bengalis reflect irrespective of age, education, place of stay, social strata, anything, its something I’ve been noticing for a while and dying to write on, am so sure so many will identify emphatically with what’s to come. A few of what’s mentioned below is ‘classically Bengali’, if you’re one of us you’ll know;

(1) I am sure I am not alone when I say I hate attending boring family get-togethers and religious gatherings but what I particularly hate is attending Bengali marriages in Kolkata, even the ones held at the classiest of places. Here are the reasons;
#At the venue there’s sure to be at least a hundred ‘grandma’s who’ll ask you at least a hundred times each how old you are; by the end of the tiring sermon you’re yourself confused!
#There’s sure to be at least a hundred ‘grandpa’s some of whom you must’ve definitely met at some previous gathering, wanting to know where you study and how many more years you have till graduation and you more often than never end up telling the same person for the fiftieth time where you study and how many years you have left. By the end of it, yes, you wish you were dead!
#And of course, there’ll be a gazillion ‘uncle’s who’d ask you over and over and over again about your plans after graduation, or if you are in school, how far your preparations for the Board exams have gone and after that a lecture on how important these formative years are, shall follow and if your lucky enough you shall also get hear about how worthy and virtuous his son/daughter is.
#And then, there’ll be ‘aunties’ badgering you with the same lame questions you’ve been subject to rigorously throughout the evening and every now and then, for no reason at all exclaim loudly with both hands on their cheeks, “Aaaaah!! How GROWN up you are” (Of course, I eat hence I grow, go observe your pet dog, imbecile!) or “How SMART you’ve become” or even “What does mummy feed you??”(Complan) and of course the, “How handsome you’ve become!” to which I don’t have much of a disapproval.
#Suppose, me and dad are standing in a corner chatting about something a certain ‘uncle’ will show up from nowhere, uninvited and ask my DAD, “So how’s your son, by the way what’s he studying now??”!!!!!! Funny, does he not see me standing there or is he scared that I might bite his face off if he asked me??
#Bengalis love to be photographed and what better occasion than a marriage could offer one so fine an opportunity? Bong marriages have as many as 2-3 photographers and cameramen and they usually employ old fashioned video cameras from the stone-age that need an extremely bright light to be projected on people to video record them. That scorching, roaring light is cast on you unexpectedly, when you’re eating, when you’re talking to people, when you’re enjoying a quiet moment in some inconspicuous corner far away from the raucous, bejeweled crowd and even when you least want to be video recorded i.e while emerging secretively from the washroom. No formalities here, if you’re attending a marriage you HAVE TO be videotaped and photographed for at least a million times!!
#Then, the most bugging of all…..coercion to overeat. The air in all Bengali marriages is thick with pleasantries like;
Mr. Ghosh: “No, you must eat three more rossogollas!!”
Mr. Dey: “Not at all, I’ve had enough, thank you”.
Mr. Ghosh: “Aare ki bolcchen……you must have at least three more…don’t feel shy…consider this your own daughter’s marriage….have at last two more…with love!”
Mr. Dey: “No really, Ghoshbabu I’ve been diagnosed with diabetes…..am already on pills, this is suicidal!!”
Mr. Ghosh: “Aaare, I will suggest a very good doctor to you, but for now, DO have two more rossogollas…..!
Mr. Dey: “BUT THIS’LL KILL ME….!!!”
Mr. Ghosh: “Let it!! You still MUST have 2 rossogollas… ke achish re?? Get Deybabu THREE of the juiciest rossogollas QUICK now!!
I, Ronojoy Basu in the capacity of a bothered Bengali marriage-party regular bona fidely certify the above conversations as true and absolutely to-the-point.
And finally, if you happen to be on the right side of twenty BEWARE, in any and every marriage you attend, the jobless grannies will start finding matches for you even without you or your parents knowing it and before you know it some photograph of yours has already become a part of someone’s family album!!

(2) Dad absolutely insists I follow him and mom to every party we’re invited to, even if I do not know the people I am visiting, something I despise wholeheartedly.
I could never relate to dad’s old buddies who’re always more interested in downing Scotch and spending the evening chatting with him and mom than sitting around discussing career stuff with me and I don’t blame them, therefore I often find myself seated, quite uncomfortably amidst his friends (as fate should have it, at most such meets I always somehow land up in the same sofa where 3 or 4 of dad’s friends whom I’ve not met forever are seated, and damn! It feels odd) not knowing where to look, or what to do, trying to finish that little glass of Coke as slowly as possible and every now and then producing those forced grins that give you a jaw-ache by the end of the day. Now comes the Bengali garnishing;

#The minute you enter the place, you have to touch so many people’s feet it becomes a painful ordeal! And mom whispers affirmatively into my ears, “Everybody!!!!”, but of course there’s confusion again, you can’t just grace those whom you know, there’ll be a handful of other elders too in the house who you think might feel offended, rather left out if not greeted in that particular way, and yes there’ll be more coming in too, therefore so as to save hearts and traditions from breaking you’d rather break your back wandering around the room, bending down and ‘pranam’ing everybody.
#The moment you inform an aunty or an uncle at the get-together that you are surviving outside Kolkata, that’s it, the next few minutes you shall spend answering a battery of finely selected questions high in intellectual value such as; “Where do u live in Pune, son?”, most of them having never had visited Pune before, “What do you eat in Pune?”, “How are the people in Pune, what do they eat?”, “Do you get fish in Pune?”, “Do you get sweets in Pune?”, “Are girls in Pune dark?”, “Why did you decide to travel that far, wasn’t the colleges in Kolkata good enough?”
But, the question that takes the cake was once asked by a certain person at some party, this gentleman, I don’t know who he was and neither am I inclined to, asked me; “Son, how lucrative is this, ‘Law thing’, and why Law when you could’ve taken up engineering or medicine, your dad is an engineer right??” Not knowing what to reply I sat staring at him.
And of course, in my personal experience, every time Pune is mentioned it quintessentially reminds the listener of some long lost distant relative who might’ve lived/still living there, and a long story of how that individual made it to the US follows.
#You must be on your guard and armed all the time cause any lame thing may be thrown at you anytime, any smart-alec comment will only lead you into more trouble and embarrassment and any attempt at making use of subtle humor shall meet with a cold reception and you wont know if they’ve got the joke and they won’t know how to conceal from you their failure at comprehending what you’ve said, therefore what follows is utter confusion and a frosty silence for a few seconds.
#At the party, if you happen to be seated with strangers for dinner, and if they happen to be Bengali, few things you’ve never experienced are about to take place;
You smile at them to break the ice, they look away.
Your cell phone starts ringing; all of them freeze their activities and stare at you and your phone, two or three of them will eventually shall start whispering and discussing among themselves the possible brand and price of your cell phone, without, of course showing any inclination of making you a part of the conversation.

(3) Train journeys can be quite lively and enlightening if there is a talkative Bengali ‘babu’ traveling along. These soda-glass adorning, ‘jhaal-muri ’chomping and extremely animated’ babus are repositories of information and can debate on anything under the sun, be it India’s foreign policy, Terrorism, poverty or hunger and often even the UN!!! They have an answer to almost everything, and they love speaking in Hindi…..with a heavy Bengali accent and expletives in Bengali!!
Now, the one and only occasion when one can see their true fierce passions surface is when particularly two topics are brought up, the CPIM government in West Bengal, East Bengal and Mohun Bagan; Communism and football!!…..lots of football!! Matches between East Bengal and Mohun Bagan, being two supremely rival football teams in this part of the hemisphere, are well known for intensely impassioned competition and equally fevered exchanges on and off-field. But, here are a few things that sometimes mess up the experience and if it’s bad enough you’ve had it;
#Discussions on football or Mamata Banerjee can be quite infectious and our Babus can jabber on well through the night till dawn, to the intense ire of everybody else.
#They absolutely insist other unwilling Bengali co-passengers to join in.
#They hate us Bongs.
#The Hindi accented Bengali gets on everybody’s nerves but at times can be quite side-splitting too.
#Discussions on where steamed Hilsa originated from and who fried the first piece of Hilsa is of nano interest to me.
#Babus absolutely hate Marwaris, so if there’s one seated in some corner of the train, you can expect more exchanges than just snide remarks.
#Finally, these babus have an uncanny knack of getting into brawls and arguments with everybody.

(4) Finally, we Bengalis have an unbearably irritating habit of questioning the obvious;

‘Ki Korcho?’(What are you doing?), is one such rage arousing question, as if the one asking can’t you see what I might be doing? Such a question is considered quite legitimate and extremely necessary to ask even if the concerned person has been sitting next to you for the past two hours in the Library or at the park bench.
‘Ki Khaccho?’(What are you eating?) and ‘Kothay Jaccho?’(Where are you going? ……even if you’re in full school uniform sitting in your school bus), are two such extremely essential queries that can drive our Bong brethren worried sick.

But it doesn’t stop here, Bengali quirks and eccentricities are well known, suffered and enjoyed. We ARE a distinguished entertaining lot. Now, in this context I would attempt to straighten a few perspectives and break a few myths that exist about my Bengali brothers and sisters;
#West Bengal isn’t all about fish and sweets and every Bengali isn’t wildly passionate about the former, the same goes for sweets.
#The plump gentleman sitting next to you wearing thick, black rimmed glasses with neatly combed hair may not be Bengali.
#Our women do not ALWAYS roam in white-sarees with a red bordering!
#Our men do not ALWAYS carry on in the proverbial, Dhoti and Kurta with a sharp-tipped umbrella slung on one hand and an end of the dhoti held in the other.
#All of us do not have revolutionary tendencies.
#All our women aren’t fat.
#Not all of us run away from fights and scuffles, most of us love burning buses though, there are just too many of them in Kolkata!
#Not ALL of us hate Marwaris and Biharis, I love Kaju-Barfi.
#No, Koena Mitra or Bipasha Basu doesn’t stay next doors.
#I don’t know why Sourav Ganguly is performing badly.
#No, all of us don’t bitch.
#‘Basu’ and ‘Bose’ isn’t one and the same thing, and so are Rai, Ray and Roy.
#Not ALL talkative Bengalis are surnamed ‘Chatter’jee.
#We are definitely not a predominantly snooty or arrogant people.
#Neither Sushmita Sen nor anybody of her like is of any distant relation to me, and no, if you come to Kolkata I can’t help you meet them.
#All of us do not have a thick ‘Bangla’ accent.
#Not ALL of us have a thing for Punjabi women (I do though).
#Not every Bengali is nuts about football.
#Not all of us get de-virginised after marriage.
#And……..Do not call us all, ‘dada’.

Well, these are for those Bengali comrades of mine who live confined at home and have a ridiculously confused outlook of the world and love to exist with myths;
#Kashmir isn’t all about apples and terrorism and Maharashtra isn’t all about ‘lively dances’ and ‘Vada-pavs’.
#No! we, Bengalis aren’t essentially the one and only intellectual and dignified community in the country.
#Just cause I live in Bombay, it doesn’t mean I go jogging with different movie stars every morning or party with models every week-end.
#‘Tendu-Mendu’ is not how South Indian languages sound!
#I am not entirely sure if Ma Kali or Ma Durga are/were Bengali.
#No!! Eating fish doesn’t make you extraordinarily intelligent and is definitely not the secret behind the Bengali dexterity!
#Not all south Indian women are fat and dark……sheesh!!
#Communism is not the ONLY reason why China is prospering, take a look at the Soviet Union.
#Lots of milk and Ghee ALONE don’t make Punjabi men tall and fair.
#Tea doesn’t make you dark.
#Sporting a goatee ALONE doesn’t make you Muslim, the actual test is the turtle-neck test, go figure!
#Not every Bihari is an IAS officer!
#There is no compulsion to eat cakes on Christmas or Biriyani on Eid.
#All Afghan men do not ALWAYS have dry fruits in their pockets.
#And finally, NO, we Bengali men aren’t specially sought for by women everywhere….hard luck fellas!

This exploration of mine therefore might appear to give off a slight negative whiff but what the heck! Quirks are quirks! We all have ‘em. I’ve luckily had a fair share of experiencing Telugu quirks too but to do justice to the thoroughly exclusive ‘Bengali-ness’ of this composition I shall have to put up with the pain of refraining from discussing them here, it’s highly tempting though.
At the end of it all, I’d like to conclude that, among others, being overly and unrelentingly subject to such particularly odd cultural behavior and practices that too from two entirely different cultures, can have an unsafe and long-lasting effect on ones psyche and can often tend to make one highly obsessive and nervous (what many call being ‘goofy’), but fellas, I see it as a small side-effect of being BONG!

Dilemmas of being a PILLION rider!!
(Dumb yet true!)

Looking around I see an entire population rolling around on wheels; motorized and ‘un’motorized, cycles of various colors and ‘CCs’, queer little things, those ‘scooties’, ‘mopeds’ and cars zipping by, choch-a-block-ing the streets of the city I’ve adopted as my home for the last 4 years for academic purposes, what cannot go without a mention is the raucous mass of human beings spilling over into the main road from the scant foot-paths and wading their way nonchalantly through the roaring and honking ocean of vehicles. Passing by, I notice the many malls, wada-pav sellers, juice vendors, the BARISTAs, the CCDs, the LEEs and the REEBOKs, the PYRAMIDS and the PANTALOONs, the PLANET Ms and the MUSIC WORLDs and then of course, the many shapely little things walking around in groups- all the stereotypes and essentials of the 'young' city, Pune..... and then all of a sudden, the nape of a dirty neck…..a cold slap on the face!!
Howdy! I am the pillion rider!!!

“You are sure to meet with an accident, son, Pune roads are unbelievably bad and people have no traffic sense and besides….you even fell off your tricycle so many times as a kid!”,
“Your stars don’t permit you to ride those which move on two wheels, if you disobey your celestial guardians, not even divine interference can keep him from a horrifying consequentiality!”(“Can I ‘ride’ those that move on two legs then??” should’ve been a reasonable doubt, wonder why it never occured to me back then?).
“Rono you are just way too scared and nervy to ride, trust me the day you set your bottoms on a bike seat……. you’re done, brother!!!”
“Over my dead body!!!! If you even think of getting our son a two-wheeler, I shall move to my maternal place….FOREVER!!” ...concluded my mother.
Such was the encouragement that emanated from the very thought or sight of me planted on a motorcycle or even….a bicycle! Therefore I have now survived for near about 4 years in the city where even the milkman has a Hero Honda, often traversing on foot and sometimes surrendering myself to the cunning ‘auto-walla’s who would be more than happy to take anyone for a leisurely ride and even graciously give a short tour of the entire city if one didn’t know his way around; these greedy,little gremlins often carry picked Meters and phony fare-cards so during my first few weeks in the city I was shelling out three-figure amounts for short trips to the market or the bank or even to the nearest movie theatre!
But also, I am not the only one. Many such ill-fated blokes in the city like me exist, who have even had to go on dates in an auto-rickshaw!! Funny, images of my first and only date should assail to my mind…….!
Yet, the scorching envy with which my eyes have followed each ‘dude’ sprawling luxuriously on their THUNDERBIRDs and BULLETs is sure to send each and every one of their petrol-guzzling chariots to the service station at least once, with serious engine issues, or so I can solemnly hope.
Nevertheless, this matter being so extremely sensitive as to send me spiraling away from the main subject matter of this essay, I shall now solely focus and expand on my experiences and expertise on the topic of ‘skilled pillion-riding!’ Yes, I have been so many people’s ‘bitch’ there’s a lot of venom to spew! So bear with me….
Here is a brief study of a few various reasons( among tonnes of others) why I hate pillion-ing;

FIRST; Whenever you're on a long ride with the guys you are never part of the excitement, the action….the sole purpose of the trip being the RIDING!!

PRO: Sit back, enjoy the breeze, the raindrops don’t strike your face twice as hard, the slush gets your friend’s trousers first and be the wimp!
CON: Being the wimp!

SECOND; You don’t know if that hot, little fox is staring at you or your rider friend.
PRO: Doesn’t make a difference, she’ll most definitely be taken.
CON: Even if she’s interested, it’s your friend and not his ‘burden’.

THIRD; You’re always the wuss who has to be ‘picked up’ and ‘dropped off’!
PRO: Good! it’s a free ride!
CON: Constant subjection to sentences like, “I’ll pick you up at six sharp! stand outside your flat”, “How will you go back home? Do I have to drop you off?”(WHAT!! Am I your date??), “Sit behind him, you’re too heavy!”….and the other guy goes, “no-no my shock absorbers are too weak!” and sometimes, “Shut it dude, don’t disturb me when I am riding!”

FOURTH; Your bike goes over a speed-breaker without braking, your n**s are crushed!!!
PRO: Ah well! They were of no REAL use anyway!
CON: WTF! YOUR N**S ARE CRUSHED!!!!!

FIFTH; You are always the sidekick who’s made to wait and guard the bike while your friend is away cashing-out or meeting an aunt.
PRO: Well you finally have ONE responsibility.
CON: Playing Sancho Panza can often be painfully detrimental to one’s self esteem!

SIXTH; Perched at the back you’re sure to be made the mule. Jackets, helmets, guitars, amplifiers, food, booze anything, often everything is dumped on you. Fair enough!
PRO: Often reminds me of a certain 10 armed Goddess and that how comfortable she might be in certain situations……what would she do if her armpits itched?
If its food and booze you’re dumped with, mooch away!! simple, they were getting too heavy to carry!
CON: Con? What con? Don’t Coat-hangers have self-esteem too?

SEVENTH; “Parking-ticket money?? The guy in the back pays, my hands are ‘full’”!
PRO: With all the change in your pockets gone you’ll probably weigh lighter on the weighing scale next time you’re checking.
CON: Crap! Can’t even afford a gum.

EIGHTH; Your imbecile of a friend decides to do a wheelie with you sitting behind and you cant refuse him.
PRO: Good! Now you know you’re stupid too.
CON: The first to go were your n**ts, now clear the road for your buns!

NINTH; If your rider friend is wearing a helmet, it’s YOUR head that’ll need protection every time his disc-brakes break into action!
PRO: Well, ‘head-banging’ gets a cool new expression!!
CON: Apart from the obvious, what a sight it shall make if you BOTH wear helmets!

TENTH; As for the grand conclusion I have reserved the most dreadfully embarrassing experience of all, something I’ve been subject to so many times , it’s when you’re riding with a girl……...as HER pillion!!!
PRO: You can put your arms around her and hope she keeps those sudden brakes going!
CON: You may just HAVE TO wear that helmet!

The message therefore stands crystal clear;
1) Whoever says sitting at the back reduces chances of getting injured in an accident is a raving madcap!
2) Well, taking that auto won’t hurt after all.
3) If you happen to be like the helpless little mule that I am DON’T ever date or go out with women who have their own transportation, it’ll only make you want to shrink to the size of a G.I. Joe
4) Putting on a sports abdomen-guard before embarking on some ‘bumpy’ pillion riding is highly recommended.
5) If your friend has gone across the road to cash-out or to irrigate the streets or whatever, having left his vehicle with you, get on it and pretend it’s yours!
6) And finally!!! Get your own means of transportation even if financing that would require you to take up contract killing……if that’s too difficult just go become an auto-walla, they have a better life!!

This is unbelievable.......6 months after I gave it all up....shux!!!!

http://shop.grasscity.com/shop/grasscity/index.html

The vapourizer takes the cake....and the cream on top.........



maybe the CHERRY too...:-/

3 weeks into Pune and I've begun hating it already, can't wake myself up before ten every morning and college is half empty.....
And I fkin hate being stared at by FAT chicks!!!! Urrrrrghhh!

Meanie-me

It’s this time of every vacation that I start contracting the blues severely and it feels terrible, there being just one and a half more days left for these holidays of mine to end, I woke up today morning feeling utterly miserable and no less than a hopeless wreck. It is these times when everything you have done during these few days that’s even distantly wrong comes back and thwacks you on the face like a boomerang!
This entire month I’ve kept getting mad at my mother now and again for having nagged me relentlessly about my ‘unhealthy and unhygienic’ existence, she always has a problem with what I wear, how I eat, what I do throughout the day, how I spend my money, how many times I repeat my clothes and practically everything else that constitutes my way of living. Being woken up early in the morning to go buy groceries is something I have always despised and that is precisely what I’ve been asked to do on numerous occasions this vacation and I HAVE SULKED!! I’ve brooded like a selfish old man. The groceries would’ve been for my own consumption during the day and for nobody else.
Although, thankfully I have never been rude to either of my parents, but it hurts to have even sulked, I feel like a criminal.
Mom’s day begins at unearthly hours in the morning, with cooking lunch for His Highness, that being myself, getting my clothes washed in the machine and making breakfast for me. Then she hurries to school. All that effort just to compensate for my having to be alone at home for a few hours till she returns from school, more so cause I am on vacation!! And should I sulk if a little favor is ever asked of me? Is, telling her how great my vacation has been because of all that she has done for me and how much I appreciate all the hard work she has put in every single day to make sure that I live like a king, enough? I think not.
And now that the day has come to an end and I see her in bed, fast asleep due to exhaustion from the day’s work, I feel so sorry for her, feel so ashamed for having been moody, for having been such a complete loser, for not having been able to convincingly put across to her that it has actually been for her that life has been such a cakewalk for the lethargic sloth that I am.
Tomorrow and day-after are my last days at home before I board that train back to Pune, I promise, for these two days I will not be moody and I’ll not brood.

The little verandah I grew up in....

A different sun rose every morning in Park Circus, CIT Road.
From my earliest recollections of those days, the scant images that materialize timidly to my mind are those of beautiful early mornings that I had spent with grandma or mom, standing in the little verandah of our little two-bed roomed rented apartment, waving out to dad or Jethu leaving for office. There was certainly something magical about that atmosphere, something immensely fulfilling. Maybe it is just the rosy, dreamy haze with which we tend to enfold the images of our earliest memories, making them appear more beautiful than they already might have been, but the unrelenting thought that there might have been after all something more to those sunny mornings makes me want to keep thinking about them. There’s a special feeling to it, it’s only me to whom it occurs and it is me alone who derives a certain comfort out of it, a strange comfort resulting out of an odd chemistry between happiness and poignancy.
I was brought up till the age of 4 or 5 in that old rented flat till we all, my dad, mom, grandma, grandpa, my baby sister and jethu, dad’s elder brother and my best friend decided to vacate it and shift out, for good.
Memories of that dark, tiny flat sit heavily on my mind and I often think about the many Saturday winter afternoons I’d spent squatting alone on the sun-warmed floor of the verandah, right next to the potted creepers, playing with my jarful or marbles and those colorful, tiny plastic animals that came free with the little boxes of ‘Tit-Bits’ mom used to get me from the marketplace very often, am not too sure if you’ll know or recollect what those were. Tit-Bits were my favorite, tiny, sugar coated candies. A box of Tit-Bits would come shaped as a joker with a mouth that could be opened by pushing up the red lolling tongue of the jester into a tiny slot glued below his nose, the sweeties then could be shaken and jerked out of the mouth.
But it wasn’t the candy that I desired, candy after candy would roll out of the joker’s mouth but that long awaited sight that would lighten me up with pure, unadulterated rapture was that of a tiny red, yellow or blue tail or head of a deer or a tiger stuck between two or three Tit-Bits near the mouth, ready to be liberated in a shake or two!! So whenever I got the slightest inkling that mom might venture out to the bazaar I’d run to her and hug her sari tightly with my tiny arms spread out as widely as possible and she’d instantly get the clue.
The other afternoons would be spent sleeping right next to my grandma, with all four of my limbs on top of her; I was so tiny I could hardly ever get my arms fully around her; she was a tad big too. I remember, in CIT Road, evenings would be heralded by a resonating namaaz read from a mosque situated just two houses after our’s. The namaaz used to be propagated through large speakers fixed atop the roof of the mosque and every evening our neighborhood would wake up to that slow and haunting recital, I always wondered what the words chanted in the namaaz meant…no one at home could tell me much! The namaaz, breaking out through the cool darkness of the evening and the eerie silence thereafter used to have an strange intoxicating effect on me and I would abandon all effort to try and get up, BUT obligations at home had to be heeded too, mom would drag me out of bed and wash all the afternoon siesta off my face and sit me down for the evening puja.
Evenings were what I used to look forward to eagerly for the reason that dad and Jethu would be back from work. Jethu ALWAYS bought something for me on his way back from work without fail, but what I especially looked forward to were those big chocolate bars called ‘Fudge’ that he used to buy me very often, they don’t sell it anymore these days. A bar of Fudge used to come with free stickers of He-Man and his beefy lot, and much to my mother’s displeasure most of them would finally end up adorning grandma’s expensive dressing-table mirror and what tantrums I used to throw if mom was ever seen, so much as even proceeding towards the mirror with a wet piece of cloth!
I often managed to tick Jethu off too, I remember this one evening when I’d created quite a stir in the house when myself, having caused a large tear in one of the pages of an expensive photography manual he had just purchased and brought home, leaped off the bed where it was kept and made off, on being asked where that ‘rippling’ sound had come from, I intelligently blamed my ‘bad’ stomach. I came so close to being walloped that night I can never thank my grandma enough for having managed to pull me out of that pickle. I realized that evening, that I was a free bird in the house as long as I had grandma backing me up.
The evenings in CIT road used to be somewhat special, while I practiced Math or handwriting with mom coming by from the kitchen every half an hour to check on me, Jethu would play soft ghazals on the stereo in the room adjacent to the verandah, sit by the verandah, chatting with dad over a smoke, sometimes there’d even be whiskey flowing, with mom replenishing the plate of snacks every now and then and myself hovering around, assisting and sometimes even outdoing dad and Jethu in consuming the contents of the plate, till mom would grab me by my ears and force me back to the other bedroom, back to my books. Grandpa would just sit in his room and grumble, “Urrgh…. the music!!!”
My Jethu used to be my best friend of sorts and I was as afraid of him. He was the one buying me all the Fudges and the Citras (a bottle of which I could never manage to finish, he would never even scold me for wasting it), and later on all the He-Mans and Gi-Joes had also come from him, Jethu would always take me out to wherever one could drag a toddler around and I hardly ever came back empty handed. The first movie I ever went out for was with him, we’d watched Indiana Jones together! Jethu was also the first one to buy me a bike and of course, introduce me to sausages!! It’s been eight years since I last met him. Mom so very often tells me that I have all his traits, the love for music and for food and that I somewhat even look like him.
No matter where the rest of my day was spent, at home assisting mom in ‘cooking’ (carrying spatulas, spoons and forks and laying them by the plates) or shopping or in Kindergarten, my early-mornings were always spent in that tiny, sun-washed verandah of ours, that’s where my day began. That has been the battlefield for so many of my skirmishes, mom chasing me around with breakfast desperate to send me off to school with a full tummy, the make-believe enemies I used to mow down with my Leo gun, the little cats I used to chase around and of course exploring the big, wooden box kept away in a corner.
That particular box used to be of enormous interest to me; made solely out of planks of wood it stood higher than me, stacked away in a corner with cobwebs growing all over it forming a fragile, translucent canopy off which the morning sunlight would sometimes reflect causing a strange and somewhat fascinating glitter, with ghosts of the past peeping out from the dark inside, through small gaps between the wooden planks making up the box and dark and ferociously ugly lizards scrambling in and around the box, it assumed a highly mysterious appearance. What could possibly be inside it? Why would mom warn me never to get near it? All that she had told me was, someone very bad was trapped inside! On many an occasion I had managed to scrape together all the nerve in me to go and try to open the box but the very sight of those slithery, hellishly hideous reptiles and the fear that some hairy, clawed, growling entity might leap out to assault me, quite effectively kept me miles away from it. I was very much at hand when one afternoon some coolies were brought to open up the box and empty the contents, grandma complained it was taking up too much space, hold you breath for what emerged from inside!!!……..
Boxfuls of old documents, a few of my grandpa’s old army daggers and a bunch of his thick army uniforms, so much for all the suspense and tales mom and grandma had woven around it to keep me off it.
No philosophy here but that old verandah acted as my eyes to the outside world, since I wasn’t allowed to venture out much, standing on my toes and peeping outside was a luxury I was allowed. Why men emerging from the mosque wore white caps was way beyond me and why a haggard, filthy looking man downstairs kept wishing strangers ‘good morning’ and ‘good night’ and made funny gestures looking up at me also went over my skull, but it was all okay and fun!
Considering the amount of time I’d spent staring at the street across and even at the main road on the other side through which most of the heavy traffic passed, I had acquired a reasonably good idea of who passed on the streets and around what time, there was a rubber-tanning factory somewhere nearby, it gave off a peculiar smell everyday during a particular time, the smell, if not offensive wasn’t too inviting either and I knew exactly what time during the day that smell would start coming. That was the profundity of knowledge I had attained spending countless afternoons standing all alone in the little verandah and peeping outside from there.
It was also in that little space that, probably for the first time I had witnessed the true horrors of a massive fire, this one had a catastrophic potentiality, one morning an LPG gas transportation truck caught fire in the street right across our house, the cylinders immediately started blowing up one by one, the smell was unbearable and so were the deafening explosions, each gas cylinder blast sent chunks of metal shooting off everywhere, the firemen went berserk trying to bring the situation under control as cylinder after cylinder exploded sending roaring echoes everywhere, the flames rising from the truck went sky high disappearing in a plume of black smoke rising higher and higher, I’ve never, till date, ever seen a fire that big and I still do have the images fresh in my memory. I remember being in the verandah, in mom’s arms, seeing people run wildly everywhere screaming and rubbing their burning eyes, it was the gas! Even our eyes burnt but we still had to see, later we were dragged indoors. It was all very amusing to me in a strange way and I felt totally secured in mom’s arms.

A recent couple of years back mom and I paid a visit to our then- landlady, she’s old and ailing, we had been her tenants for very long, my grandma and her were good friends and she knew us well, she wanted to see us. Her house in CIT Road was located right behind our’s. In her house I discovered that the glass windows by the stairway leading up to the old lady’s room offered a clear view of what was left of our erstwhile residence, the part of the house that could be seen through those windows was the passage that connected the kitchen and the bathroom outside to the rest of the rooms inside. Mom kept climbing on but I stopped.
A short, chill flash of pain cut through my heart as my eyes caught the very visions I had grown up seeing, through the dirty and hardly transparent glass I saw a faint image of that very kitchen where mom and grandma had spent innumerable evenings cooking and chatting with Jethu tip-toeing in and out of it carrying something to go with his whiskey, the little room right next to it where dad, mom and I used to sleep, the very room where mom used to sit and teach me nursery rhymes during those long summer afternoons and tell me stories about her younger days and dad taught me and my baby sister how to bat, the very passage up and down which I used to race, being chased by either dad or Jethu or even my sister…..but that’s all these windows would permit! But I was desperate to see the verandah; unfortunately it was totally on another side!!!! I felt weak in the knees and staggered upstairs. Where was my verandah?
Amidst all the; “Oh how grown up you are!” and “It’s been so long…where do you study…how many more years left to go??….”and so on and so forth, my mind kept wandering away, there was only one thing on my mind, I craved and yearned to take one long, last look at my old little dwelling, my sweet little verandah, oh how I craved!
Gathering up enough courage I requested the old lady to let me out to her terrace so I could see our flat properly, she obliged immediately after I fulfilled her condition, that is, of devouring two extra rasgollas!
My being lead upstairs to the terrace triggered off a hushed conversation among the womenfolk in the house to the effect of, “Oh how sentimental the boy is….oh! Just look at him…he just couldn’t forget…after all who does?!”
The terrace was disappointing and all I could see was the roof of the house, something I’d never seen during the entirety of my stay there and am sure neither did dad or anybody else. Finally, after a long examination of directions and their corresponding windows in the house, I was lead into a room that had a lucid view of my tiny little flat.
This is where the final bludgeon fell on me. Our kitchen was broken up and renovated from the inside; the new owners had made it into some sort of a store room!! The little bedroom next to it was now a mass dining room and looked nothing like it did before! And the passage was renovated to make a hallway replete with carpets and chandeliers, a servant told me that the place had been turned into a hall for conducting Muslim weddings. But where was my verandah!? Why could I still not see it? Evidently, there was no window in the house that could show me my verandah.
While leaving as we passed by the old house I stopped the car and got out, the verandah looked just as it used to, from the outside, unpainted and with creepers growing all around the outer wall. A lump appeared in my throat as I realized I was standing in the very same spot where the haggard, old mad-man used to stand, about 10 years back, looking up and making faces at me. I looked around for him; he was nowhere to be seen. CIT road was a different place now; it wasn’t the CIT Road that I had left behind.
My little verandah kept drifting further and further away as we drove away, one moment it was there, the next moment it was gone.
“If wishes were horses, beggars would ride!”, they say. Quite right, this beggar could’ve owned a stable as huge as those in English farms, drumming with Japanese Taiko drummers, kicking out Hugh Hefner and taking his place, owning an entire winery, driving my own Lexus, being named the next potential Booker-bagger after Kiran Desai, name the steed and my stable houses her.
No philosophy here again, but am so prepared to let them all go, let them leave me dream after dream, but only in exchange of one dying wish;
‘Take me back to where I came from, I don’t like this world cause it is too cold here. Let me go back to that very tiny, sun-warmed universe of mine where I belonged, all alone with that mysterious wooden box and the lizards, the small plastic animals and the creepers surrounding me, let innocence and love prevail in that world and in that microcosm of my childhood let me stand tip-toed, peeping out, waiting for a new sun to rise!”